“Are you sure of what you’re saying?”
“Absolutely not! As I said, this is only a supposition.”
Sebag sensed an opportunity to tackle his colleague. Usually he was a better sport. Usually, yes . . .
“When we suspected the guard at Cantalou, we didn’t hesitate to attribute to him the intention to deliberately provoke tragedies, so why should we change our approach? If our corbeau simply wanted to divulge adulteries, he would have stopped with the first tragedy. But the chronology shows us that he continued.”
“What is the likelihood that revealing an infidelity would lead to a tragedy like the ones we’ve seen?” Julie said with concern. “Do you realize the implications of what you’re suggesting?”
“Yes. I thought about it all day yesterday. In many cases, a couple can overcome such revelations all by itself . . .”
He avoided meeting Julie’s eyes, in an attempt to maintain a neutral tone.
“In many other cases, the couple separates. Fortunately, tragedies are rare.”
“Have you considered how many facts this man might have known? And how many the accusations he might have made?”
“Regarding the number of facts, I agree with you, it’s enormous. But regarding the revelations, I think they were much less numerous. He must have chosen his targets carefully. Otherwise we’d have had more leaks.”
He added, in a graver tone than he intended:
“Adultery is one thing and the way in which one . . . in which one learns of it is another. I think this individual very skillfully made his interlocutors’ anger mount.”
Gilles let his colleagues digest what he’d said. Then he moved on to the second part of his presentation.
“And that shows us the second way of identifying our corbeau. Who can have access to so much personal information about people?”
Gilles had already drawn up a list, but he wanted his colleagues to draw up another one spontaneously. A list that might be different.
“It must be his occupation that gives him this information,” Llach suggested. “A doctor, lawyer, psychologist, cop . . .”
“A private detective,” Molina added.
“A physical therapist,” Julie whispered, looking at Gilles.
“A hairdresser or a beautician,” Thierry Lambert proposed. “I have a friend who’s a beautician in a village and I can tell you that she knows all the gossip in the place.”
“That’s a lot,” Molina observed critically. “We might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Castello raised his arm to stop an exchange that threatened to become discouraging.
“Obviously, we’re not going to start monitoring all those occupations. Our first task will be to draw up a list of the corbeau’s victims. Gilles will inventory recent crimes that might have resulted from a domestic quarrel. François, Joan, and Jacques will make a list of divorces in the department over the past few months and look into the reasons for these separations. Keeping in mind, to be sure, that the corbeau’s victims were not necessarily all officially married.”
The three inspectors he’d mentioned fidgeted on their seats. The assignment seemed to them to involve an enormous amount of work for an uncertain result.
“We don’t have to draw up an exhaustive list,” Castello assured them. “We’re after big fish. We’re casting a wide net and seeing what we catch. You get all the divorce judgments for the past few months—let’s say the last three—initially setting aside the ones involving mutual consent. If you have privileged relations with lawyers specializing in such cases, don’t hesitate to make use of them: their information might be extremely valuable in making a first selection. We can’t interview all the divorced people in the department—we don’t have either the time or the means to do that—so don’t hesitate to follow your intuition. And any victim you find must be questioned at length. What we need is to find a connection among them all, that’s the best way to find the informer.”
Castello glanced at Gilles. They had discussed the investigation together before the meeting.
“Between Valls and Abad, we have two possible connections, their work and their leisure activity: pool. The first connection doesn’t work for the other two victims, and the second doesn’t really work, either. Except if we consider that the Balto, the bar where they played, is downtown, not far from the area where the corbeau made most of his calls. Might be a good idea to keep that in mind . . . Anything else, Gilles?”
Sebag nodded. He’d said there were three ways of identifying the informer and he had thus far only presented two.
“There’s another factor we should never lose sight of during our investigations: the list of unhappy couples we’re going to draw up might include our perpetrator.”
Astonished, his colleagues stared at him. Julie was the first to understand.
“Is that what you were referring to a little while ago when you said that the corbeau was settling his accounts with adulterous women? You think that’s his motive, that he himself was deceived by his own wife?”
“You won’t have failed to notice that in the four cases we’ve discovered, the corbeau revealed only infidelities committed by women. For the time being, that’s only a simple, maybe even a simplistic, hypothesis, but we mustn’t neglect it. And here we come back to the different occupations mentioned earlier. If among recently divorced people you find lawyers, psychologists, cops, private detectives, physiotherapists, et cetera, give them priority.”
“You will transmit everything to Gilles as you discover it,” Castello said. “He’s going to coordinate this investigation. As for you, Julie, I would like you to spend the day at the city’s video-surveillance center: somewhere in Perpignan there’s a man who spends his time following people and taking pictures of them with a telephoto lens. It must be rare for that kind of equipment to be used inside the city. At one time or another, he must have been filmed, and he will probably be filmed again. View their archives, starting with the places where the photos we have in our possession were taken, and first of all the Hôtel du Gecko. You will work with Thierry Lambert.”
Castello paused before asking:
“Anything you want to add, say, or object to, ladies and gentlemen?”
Sebag looked at his colleagues. He was well aware that his reasoning had a flaw. And a major one! He was waiting to see if anyone would mention it. He saw Ménard wiggling on his chair. The objection would come from him. François ran his palm over his crew cut, and then waved his hand over his head.
“Yes, I have a question to ask.”
Castello gave him the floor. Ménard addressed Gilles directly.
“From the outset, you have been speaking of ‘the man’ or ‘the individual.’ What if it were a woman? After all, this way of taking revenge—anonymous letters, murder by proxy—could be that of a woman, couldn’t it?”
All the faces turned to Gilles. Ménard’s remark contradicted what they had just considered as established.
“The term ‘corbeau’ was popularized by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film, which came out under the German occupation,”30 Sebag explained. “Because in that film, the author of the anonymous letters signed his messages with a drawing of a raven. The film was inspired by a case that occurred in Tulle31 between 1917 and 1922. It took the police five years to identify and arrest the perpetrator—who was a woman, Angèle Laval, a secretary at the prefecture. One of her victims had ended up committing suicide.”
Gilles was aware that his long-winded explanation reeked of Wikipedia. So what? It showed that he had done his homework and that Ménard’s criticism had not caught him unprepared.
“Yesterday, after thinking about this case for hours, I considered the possibility that our corbeau might be a woman. But this morning I used only the term ‘individual,’ which does not in any sense imply that the reference is solely to a man
. I could have said ‘person’ rather than ‘individual.’32 But I didn’t want to influence you. I wanted to see if the objection would arise by itself. A priori, most of you think in fact that the corbeau is a man. However, nothing in the file allows us to assert that.”
Sebag looked at his colleagues, one after the other. Then he stopped at Ménard. From the beginning of this case, François had been nitpicking. Gilles had already discreetly tackled him a little earlier. He couldn’t resist the desire to do it again.
“The real question now is: are we following this male lead because it is . . . how to put it . . . intuitively obvious, or because for too long we have wrongly suspected a man—the guard at Cantalou—and are incapable of starting our reasoning over from zero?”
On his left, Gilles noticed Molina’s smile. He saw his teammate glance at Ménard and he could almost hear him thinking: “Gotcha! Take that!”
“So we come back to the question: could the corbeau be a woman? What do you think, François?”
“Uhh . . . I think we can’t exclude that hypothesis.”
To make it clear that he considered that answer inadequate, Gilles turned to his other colleagues.
“What else?”
The lieutenants looked at one another. Joan Llach was the first to offer a reasoned argument.
“When a crime is involved, we’re usually dealing with men. And the more serious the crime, the greater the chance that it was committed by a man. But above all, it’s a question of probability. We shouldn’t eliminate anything.”
“Making use of anonymous letters has something devious about it that might be more feminine,” Julie prudently suggested.
“I was waiting for you to say that,” Molina commented. “I wouldn’t have allowed myself . . .”
“I suspected that,” Julie smiled. “I know how tactful you are.”
Sebag waited for the chuckling to die down before continuing.
“I’ve looked into that question as well, and it’s true that corbeaux are more often women. But most of the time, the letters contain insults and slanders. Our case is different: our corbeau reveals precise, proven facts, facts that he himself has brought to light through what was probably long and meticulous work.”
The superintendent let a few seconds go by and, since no one else seemed to have anything to say, he concluded:
“So we won’t set aside any lead, but to move faster, we’ll give priority, at least initially, to leads involving males. Dismissed! We’re going all out on this case, but we can’t do it for long. Do a good job, I’m counting on you.”
The policemen immediately stood up and left in single file. Castello put his hand on Sebag’s arm.
“I’m glad to see that you’re feeling better and that you’re recovering your effectiveness.”
Gilles thanked him soberly. He didn’t want to get drawn into a personal discussion. Castello was still holding his arm.
“Do you remember that I mentioned a promotion to you?”
Sebag couldn’t help sighing. His boss had been talking to him about this promotion at least once a month for the past year. And each time, he’d turned it down. He had made his choice when Séverine was born. To spend more time with his children, he’d chosen a flextime work schedule. Since then, he had gone back to full-time, and had been transferred to Perpignan, but basically nothing had changed for him. His family and his leisure activities had priority over his work. Even if his children were growing up and moving away, even if his wife had cheated on him . . . A new rank and a salary increase meant little to him, he wanted to be able to go home every night as early as possible and go out and run the trails from time to time without feeling guilty about it. His colleagues put up with his escapades and even helped him hide them. It would be different if he were promoted.
“I promise you to think about it again, boss.”
“That’s right . . . Take me for an idiot!”
After drinking a quick coffee at the Carlit, Gilles began by plunging into the TAJ.33 Created very recently, the TAJ combined the old police files with the gendarmerie’s files. It constituted a major advance for the work of all investigators. Unfortunately, it was still inadequate: ongoing cases seldom appeared in it, and even for those that had already been sent to court, key procedural elements were missing. In the TAJ, you found who did what and when, but as for the how and the why, you still had to call the people in charge of the file or travel to consult their archives. That wasn’t too difficult for a case dealt with at police headquarters. On the other hand, it became longer and more complex when it involved an investigation carried out by the gendarmerie.
His work seemed to him even harder than he had thought. The example of Valls’s suicide showed that the corbeau’s revelations had not always led to the punishment of an adulterous woman. It could easily be imagined that sometimes the cuckold’s rancor had been directed against the lover rather than against the wife. Therefore he had to broaden his research.
For hours he consulted, compiled, sorted, classified, resorted, unclassified, ordered cases that ranged from murders—the former were, fortunately, very rare in the department—to simple nighttime disturbances of the peace. Thus he also made a large number of telephone calls to ask for details or to request that he be faxed the basics of a proceeding.
Late in the afternoon what had to happen happened: a pitiless headache combined with total discouragement. Gilles opened his drawer to take a paracetamol tablet. Next to the box of medicine, the whiskey bottle taunted him. He’d bought it three or four days earlier and a little less than a third of it remained. For a moment, he was tempted to take the pill with a slug of alcohol, but he decided that the time of provocations and childish acts was over. He grabbed the bottle and headed for the door. He opened it partway and looked out. There was no one in the hallway. He stole down the corridor to the rest-room and poured the remainder of the whiskey down the sink. With a glass of water in his hand, he went back to his office and swallowed the pill.
Around 6 P.M., Julie reported in. She seemed as exhausted as she was depressed. He offered her a paracetamol tablet, which she accepted.
“Do you know how many surveillance cameras there are in this town?” she asked.
“At least a hundred, I think.”
“A hundred and eighty-three, to be exact. And if we tried to review all that in one week, at the rate of five eight-hour days, there would have to be . . . guess how many of us?”
“Stop . . . otherwise I’m going to have to take another pill.”
“If I’m not mistaken, it would take fifteen hundred and thirty-seven cops working on it. Do you think that if I ask Castello for help with this, I’ll have any chance of getting it?”
“Try calling the minister directly, instead . . . . But weren’t you supposed to make a selective investigation focused on the places where the recent photos were taken?”
“That’s what I did, and I didn’t find anything. And for good reason! All the photos were taken more than two weeks before. And as I told you, in Perpignan the images are kept for only two weeks.”
“I thought the law authorized keeping them for a month . . .”
“The law, yes, but not necessarily the storage capacity.”
She looked again at the sheet of paper on which she’d made her calculations:
“Do you want me to convert the sixty-one thousand, four hundred and eighty-two hours of recordings into teraoctets for you?”
“Have pity on me . . .”
“It’s a question of money. Storing images is expensive. The city of Perpignan has split the difference: only fourteen days of storage.”
“Bad luck for us. And otherwise . . . has Thierry been of help to you, at least?”
The youngest guy on their team was also the one about whom his colleagues had the most reservations. His reflections alternated between the most dismaying
naïveté and the crudest imbecility. The recurrent joke at headquarters consisted of proposing all kinds of hypotheses to explain how he had managed to get such a job at such a young age. Suggestions ranged from the classic diploma found in a laundry detergent package or in a bad German chocolate egg to an administrative error resulting from his very common last name. The jokes always ended by ardent laments for that other Thierry Lambert who had never gotten the diploma he deserved and was probably vegetating somewhere in an obscure department in northern France.
“He remained focused for a good two hours, I have to admit,” Julie replied. “Then afterward he spotted two or three buddies in the images and started following them from one camera to the next. Then he started calling them to ask what they were doing on such and such a day at that hour and in that place!”
“Didn’t you refocus him?”
“Since I’m the most recent arrival on the team, that seemed difficult to me. I told him he could do whatever he wanted so long as he kept an eye out for the photographer. In any case, we’ll never be able to review more than a tiny part of everything that was recorded so that whether we’re doing it chronologically, at random, or while following buddies, it comes after all to the same thing!”
“You’re not wrong about that . . .”
“If you want my opinion, this shows the limits of these video-surveillance systems. The number of cameras in a city can always be increased, but enough agents can never be put in front of the screens. And if we had enough agents, it would be better to put them directly on the streets, wouldn’t it? In Perpignan, on any given day there are only five municipal policemen monitoring the screens. Five for a hundred and eighty-three cameras—you’d have to be really lucky to follow a crime live.”
“Sounds like you’d have to really like channel surfing to do that job . . .”
“For sure . . . if you don’t, you get bored.”
“The film must not be very exciting: lots of characters but no plot. Perpignan will never win an Oscar with that. At most, a special prize for experimental cinema at Cannes . . .”
Crimes of Winter Page 32